We, the Australian Library and Information Association, Google, Inspire Foundation and Yahoo! agree that Australia needs to take effective action to ensure that internet users, and particularly children, have a safe experience online.In December 2009, Minister Stephen Conroy announced the details of the government's proposals for mandatory filtering by ISPs of online content in the Refused Classification (RC) category. We welcome the Minister's invitation for consultations on the proposed policy.Mandatory filtering of RC material is a significant Australian public policy proposal that should matter to every parent, young person, school and business. A discussion designed to achieve the balance between protecting children, preserving the benefits of internet access and treating adults like adults is welcome.As a large proportion of child sexual abuse content is not found on public websites, but in chat-rooms or peer-to-peer networks, we know the proposed filtering regime will not effectively protect children from this objectionable material.In fact, the policy may give parents a 'false sense of security' encouraging them to reduce their supervision.We are concerned that the scope of content to be filtered is too wide. Filtering all RC material could block content with a strong social or educational value.The implementation of mandatory filtering is a massive technical and logistical undertaking. We note with concern that the ISP filtering pilot/trials, and the related report from Enex Testlabs, both of which were relied on in the formulation of the filtering policy, by the government did not follow the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy's own 2008 Technical Testing Framework.The Enex report, and a separate report from Telstra, acknowledged that filtering systems would struggle to handle the filtering of high volume sites, with the Enex report stating: ".... in situations where there is a potential for very high traffic sites, such as YouTube, to have pages on the filtering list, this could result in significantly higher traffic rates passing through the filter, even though the specific pages being accessed are not those on the blacklist. This could cause additional load on the filtering infrastructure and subsequent performance bottlenecks".According to a large body of peer-reviewed research on the matter the most effective way to protect our children on the internet is achieved by adopting a strategy containing the following three Core Principles:Education: Properly funding a national comprehensive cyber-safety education program for children and parents on how to avoid inappropriate material and stay safe online. If any element of online safety is to be mandatory, it should be education.Policing: Significantly increasing and funding the level of oversight by the government and federal police focused on the locations, such peer-to-peer, where child sexual abuse materials are disseminated.Technical Measures: If the government and the broader political system are determined to implement technical measures as part of online safety efforts, then we believe Australia can learn from the approaches adopted in peer countries, particularly in Europe. The strong consensus internationally is for ISPs, police and government to work together in partnership targeting a clearly defined and narrow band of child sexual abuse material. Under this filtering regime:
- there would be little to no impact on the internet's performance or greatly increased costs to users;
- there would be an environment in which adults are able to choose whether to have their service filtered or not.
We urge further adjustments to the government's proposal in the interest improving online safety for young people and look forward to working with the government to that end.
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
A message to Stephen Conroy
Monday, 15 February 2010
Google Buzz - A stalker's best friend?
Still think that Google Buzz presents no real threat to privacy? Think again. According to the Guardian, it appears that trusting Buzz is a big mistake. As one young woman discovered, your most frequently used contacts suddenly gain access to just about everything you do as it relates to your Gmail account.
What does this mean to you?
As the article points out, there is a great disconnect between the way Google Buzz does things and the way people expect it to work for them. Anything that is designed to share things without letting the user know, by default, is complete bunk. Seriously, Google needs to rethink their position on this and stop acting like Facebook with everything turned on by default.
How to turn Buzz off...
(It is very simple!)
How to turn Buzz off...
(It is very simple!)
Sunday Times publish pseudo-science as it were fact – their “scientists” have links to big oil
The Sunday Times today run pseudo-science as if it were real science with a story titled:
“World may not be warming, say scientists”
So just who are these ‘scientists’ making the claim at the heart of The Sunday Times’s story?
According to the lobbying transparency organisation SourceWatch, the so-called “Science and Public Policy Institute” (SPPI) – who are named in The Sunday Times as the organisation behind the “research” – are none other than a spin off of the Exxon-funded group “The Frontiers of Freedom”.
The Royal Society has attacked Exxon for its funding of such front groups, which have been described as “the climate denial industry”.
The ‘research paper’ was not ‘peer reviewed,’ which isn’t surprising given that the ‘scientist’ who authored the paper is Anthony Watts, known to the rest of us as one of the world’s leading climate denial bloggers and somebody without any climate science credentials.
The SPPI draws heavily on the papers of Lord Monckton, who the SPPI list among their “personnel”. Viscount Monckton is a UKIP peer who claims to have a Nobel Prize when he doesn’t.
He also claims to have a cure for HIV! Of course he doesn’t. He described the Copenhagen conference as “a sort of Nuremburg rally,” and recently attacked a young Jewish climate campaigner as “Nazi”.
Also today, The Mail on Sunday reports the astonishing claim that “there has been no global warming since 1995”.
In reality, according to both the World Meteorological Society (WMO) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the 2000s were the warmest decade on record.
The Mail’s claim is particularly ironic given that the website of the climate denial lobby group, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, promotes a graph of temperatures beginning in 2001, presumably precisely to conceal the marked warming recorded through the 20th Century and the fact that nine of the ten warmest years occurred this decade.
In related news, it has been reported how a quote held up by sceptics as a ‘smoking gun’, as it was purported to have come from former IPCC and Met Office climate scientist Sir John Houghton, was fabricated.
Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation quoted Houghton as saying “unless we announce disasters no one will listen” – but on the letters page of today’s Observer, Houghton demands a public retraction from Peiser.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation, whilst demanding transparency from the scientific community, refuses to reveal who fund them. As Left Foot Forward has already reported, however, many of their key people have ties to the fossil fuel industry.
Google baulks at Conroy's call to censor YouTube
Google says it will not "voluntarily" comply with the government's request that it censor YouTube videos in accordance with broad "refused classification" (RC) content rules.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy referred to Google's censorship on behalf of the Chinese and Thai governments in making his case for the company to impose censorship locally.
Google warns this would lead to the removal of many politically controversial, but harmless, YouTube clips.
University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt, one of Australia's top communications experts, said that to comply with Conroy's request Google "would have to install a filter along the lines of what they actually have in China".
As it prepares to introduce legislation within weeks forcing ISPs to block a blacklist of RC websites, the government says it is in talks with Google over blocking the same type of material from YouTube.
YouTube's rules already forbid certain videos that would be classified RC, such as sex, violence, bestiality and child pornography. But the RC classification extends further to more controversial content such as information on euthanasia, material about safer drug use and material on how to commit more minor crimes such as painting graffiti.
Google said all of these topics were featured in videos on YouTube and it refused to censor these voluntarily. It said exposing these topics to public debate was vital for democracy.
In an interview with the ABC's Hungry Beast, which aired last night, Conroy said applying ISP filters to high-traffic sites such as YouTube would slow down the internet, "so we're currently in discussions with Google about ... how we can work this through".
"What we're saying is, well in Australia, these are our laws and we'd like you to apply our laws," Conroy said.
"Google at the moment filters an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government; they filter an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Thai government."
Google Australia's head of policy, Iarla Flynn, said the company had a bias in favour of freedom of expression in everything it did and Conroy's comparisons between how Australia and China deal with access to information were not "helpful or relevant".
Google has recently threatened to pull out of China, partly due to continuing requests for it to censor material.
"YouTube has clear policies about what content is not allowed, for example hate speech and pornography, and we enforce these, but we can't give any assurances that we would voluntarily remove all Refused Classification content from YouTube," Flynn said.
"The scope of RC is simply too broad and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information. RC includes the grey realms of material instructing in any crime from [painting] graffiti to politically controversial crimes such as euthanasia, and exposing these topics to public debate is vital for democracy."
Asked for further comment, a Google Australia spokeswoman said that, while the company "won't comply voluntarily with the broad scope of all RC content", it would comply with the relevant laws in countries it operates in.
However, if Conroy includes new YouTube regulations in his internet filtering legislation, it is not clear if these would apply to Google since YouTube is hosted overseas.
"They [Google] don't control the access in Australia - all their equipment that would do this is hosted overseas ... and I would find it very hard to believe that the Australian government can in any way force an American company to follow Australian law in America," Landfeldt said.
"Quite frankly it would really not be workable ... every country in the world would come to Google and say this is what you need to do for our country. You would not be able to run the kind of services that Google provides if that would be the case."
This week the Computer Research and Education Association (CORE) put out a statement on behalf of all Australasian computer science lecturers and professors opposing the government's internet filtering policy.
They said the filters would only block a fraction of the unwanted material available on the internet, be inapplicable to many of the current methods of online content distribution and create a false sense of security for parents.
CORE said the blacklist could be used by current and future governments to restrict freedom of speech, while those determined to get around the filters and access nasty content could do so with ease.
Sunday, 14 February 2010
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